Self Crit

The title of my piece is “Recollections of a Zebra”. This stems from one of the more personal random thoughts that I had when doing the free writing. That is, it was one of the parts that I edited out of the public version of the free writing. The original idea going into the image selection process was to be as whimsical as possible in the selection, which came from the rambling free writing. But, because of the selection method, which was as random as I could bring it to be, I wanted to try and control it with a moderately rigorous structure in the video. I decided to use morse code as a means of structuring the images, and sticking that morse code into a mask inside of other images. I was attempting to make it so that, while the audience may not understand the code, they were still associating what was going on in the mask with what was going on in the larger images, which had been separated into different segments based on subject. Also, I put the mask of the morse code at the bottom of the screen, where subtitles would normally be.
The primary issues arose in photoshop. For some reason, when trying to create the pauses between images that would show the separation between the letters in the code, images would stick. I ended up having to create longer and longer pauses to make up for this. However, in the final version, for some reason the images didn’t stick in the final render. This caused the pauses to last longer, and created, what seemed to me, to be images appearing at random intervals. However, when watching I could see that since a lot of the images were reoccurring due to certain letters being used far more than others, a weird repetition at odd intervals was occurring inside of the larger images. I was not opposed to this effect and decided to stick with it. In fact, I started to see it as the real strength of the piece since the images were easily noticeable as being repeating, and I think really pulled together the idea that it was trying to say something. In the end, my primary issue with the piece is the length, but due to the sheer number of images used it was almost unavoidable if I wanted people to be able to see the images at all. Also, I should have worked mainly in FCP, as FCP really streamlined the process. Things that were taking me tens of minutes in Photoshop were reduced to a minute or two in FCP.
Some things I may try to improve this project would be to use a long rectangular mask rather than the circle mask for the code. This would make it read more like a subtitles bar, but the images themselves would be lost, thus the repetition of the images would be lost. The other thing I would change is to decrease the size of the whole thing to about one and a half minutes, and use only the images from a few of the major groups since at the moment the whole piece runs pretty long. These can be resolved pretty easily.
The biggest thing I learned here was that FCP seems to automatically resize images to scale down to the screen when imported. This greatly simplified the process and I wish I had learned it before I started to run scripts in photoshop, which would have been completely unnecessary if I had realized from the start.